


In Three Parts

by zenonaa



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: F/M, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-12 09:57:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18444209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenonaa/pseuds/zenonaa
Summary: '“Eh? Why does an artist paint? Why does a singer perform?” she retorted, like talking about the weather or something equally mundane. “Why does a sister dedicate herself to her twin sister even if she’ll get stabbed in the back or skewered by spears in the end? It’s a feeling. Passion.”Byakuya tried to speak, to request her to elaborate, but Syo sat up and talked over him.“Hey, hey. You’re an interviewer. A sexy interviewer, but an interviewer all the same, not a freaking psychiatrist,” she said firmly. “It’s who I am, okay? Some people are born with red hair, and some are like me, killers.”Syo motioned toward herself. He stared at her.“There is no one like you,” he told her plainly.'Togami learns more about Syo.





	In Three Parts

**Author's Note:**

> for my friend! <3

Aloysius Pennyworth came from a family of butlers. His father had been a butler, and his father’s father had been a butler, and so on, back through generations upon generations. Though Aloysius had admittedly been somewhat unruly in his early years, mixing with the wrong crowds and at one point getting acquitted of a double murder, he didn’t regret returning to his roots and dedicating the rest of his life to assisting others as a butler.

In any case, being a butler could be just as eventful as being a gang member, especially when one was the head butler of a fourteen year old billionaire.

The door to Byakuya Togami’s bedroom opened, leading into a space that could fit a bungalow inside of it. Such a large room was necessary, after all, as Byakuya required a place that could accommodate all of his possessions, like his piano, violin, pool table, king-sized bed, computers and books upon books upon books, just as a few examples. Everything was neatly arranged on a dark wood laminate flooring bordered by off-white walls. Byakuya’s mother had instructed that the room be furnished with warm hues and wooden accents, but the potted plant in one corner had been Aloysius’s idea. A nice splash of green.

On the other side of the room, Byakuya sat at his desk, and on hearing the door, he turned around on his swivel chair with his hands steepled. Aloysius approached, revealing his withered face to the other, and strode forward with his pale blue eyes fixed on Byakuya. 

He stopped a short distance away.

“You wanted me?” asked Aloysius, holding his hands down in front of himself.

Byakuya gave a nod and turned his chair back around so he faced his computer again.

“I need you to sign up for an eBay account so I can buy something from it,” Byakuya told him.

Here lay a pause.

“e...Bay?” repeated Aloysius slowly, drawing his face into a frown that added more wrinkles. “I think I’ve heard of that. It’s a dating website, is it not?”

“What? No. It’s not.” Byakuya’s brow creased, and talking matter-of-factly, he explained, “It’s a website that deals with auctions and consumer to consumer sales. I wish to purchase something on the website that someone is selling.”

Aloysius raised his eyebrows a little.

“What is stopping you?” he asked.

Byakuya pursed his lips.

“Age,” he replied.

At his young age, barely in his teens, Byakuya had amassed a vast amount of money, not just from his family but from his own ventures too. It couldn’t, however, buy some things, such as years that he could add to his age right now so he could legally sign up to an  American multinational corporation.

Aloysius studied Byakuya’s earnest face.

“This sounds important,” said Aloysius seriously. “What is it that you wish to buy?”

Byakuya didn’t hesitate for even a second.

“Genocider Syo’s scissors,” said Byakuya.

Ah, yes. That unidentified serial killer murdering all those men. Their scissors. Aloysius stooped down and pulled out his reading glasses from his shirt pocket. He put them on and squinted at the screen.

“You may need to assist me in signing up,” said Aloysius, resting a hand on the back of Byakuya’s chair.

“Fine. Let’s do it now, before someone else buys it,” Byakuya demanded, and Aloysius watched him open up the necessary tabs on his internet browser. 

Now, Aloysius wasn’t the most tech-savvy person but he could work a computer, and he had an email address, though he let Byakuya fill in a form using Aloysius’s personal details. Besides, Byakuya could type faster anyway, and Byakuya only paused when he came to a box asking for a password for the account.

“You choose something,” said Aloysius. “I don’t think I will be using the site for myself, so it’s not important that I remember it.”

Byakuya flexed his fingers. A multitude of passwords were available, yet that abundance of choice made it harder to choose just one. He scraped his teeth against his lips in thought and after some deliberation, he typed in a certain star from a constellation, with various symbols and numbers thrown in that would only mean something to him... and Aloysius.

With a final click on the mouse, the page on the screen changed, now showing a lot less text, and Byakuya straightened up.

“You will have a confirmation email in your inbox,” Byakuya informed him. “You need to click a link in it. Then I can start using the account to shop.”

“I shall open it swiftly,” said Aloysius. He stepped back and asked, “Would you like a snack?”

“Coffee and kołacz,” said Byakuya, still facing his computer.

“As you wish.”

Aloysius bowed then left the room. Byakuya opened the tab with the auction page again and stared at the photograph of the scissors. There had been a few bids placed on it, but he planned to forego that tedious process and purchase them at a certain high price. After he bought them, all he had to do was wait for them to arrive.

And that he did.

They took four weeks to be delivered to this mansion. Not ‘his’. ‘This’. The Togami Conglomerate owned several around the world, of course, and the mansion he currently lived at was the one closest to his private school. While he waited for it, Byakuya went about his usual things. Attending classes, participating in extra lessons at home, reading through cold cases, playing on the stock market, attending meetings with other billionaires and listening to aspiring businessmen pitch him possible investments... the usual sort of thing. 

Hearing someone rap on his door, Byakuya uttered a curt, “enter,” and the door to his room opened. Aloysius came in with a box. It was paper brown with a sticker slapped onto it.

“I assume that this is your order,” said Aloysius, walking over. “For the past week, I have had emails from the eBay website telling me to leave feedback. It has been quite persistent.”

Aloysius handed the package to Byakuya, who picked away at it until he got it open. He extracted the contents slowly. Swathed in thin layers of foam paper were the scissors, presumably, though he could only feel the general shape of them for now, and he pried the wrapping apart to get to what was inside. 

His eyes widened a bit. They looked like scissors. Custom-made scissors, to be precise, with large, curved finger rests. At some point, they must have been cleaned, because there weren’t any blood stains on them. None that he could see, at least.

While Byakuya examined the scissors, Aloysius spoke again.

“I know I said that I doubted I would be using the website for myself, but I was looking at it today and there is a seller who stocks doilies enmasse that have taken my fancy,” confessed Aloysius.

Byakuya didn’t reply, still inspecting the scissors. Aloysius tilted his head to one side.

“Young master?” he said curiously.

“Capital P, Polaris, exclamation mark, hash, lower case B.T. comma, the number thirteen,” said Byakuya in monotone without lifting his gaze. He heard Aloyisus’s footfall gradually recede until the door shut as Aloysius made his exit.

As for Byakuya, he leaned back in his chair and turned the scissors over in his hands. 

Somewhere, in the world, was the original owner. A serial killer who eluded authorities, time and time again. Even the prestigious Kirigiri family of detectives failed to identify who Genocider was. Byakuya thought, if he had access to all the information that the police had about that killer, he would have been able to solve the mystery. Yet, despite being heir to the Togami family, he had been denied access, and when he made a request to his father, his father sent a message demanding that ‘the heir’ not waste time on such matters.

He stroked the scissors with his thumb gently, having only seen them before now in the photo on the seller’s page and in grainy images that he managed to obtain of the crime scene from the dark web. 

G.S. was engraved into the upper blade of the scissors.

“Genocider Syo,” he said to himself quietly, and he promised himself that he would be the one to unmask the killer. 

* * *

It would start with these scissors.

The scissors remained in his possession for the next several years. Most of the time, they stayed in a sliding drawer storage box with a matte laminate surface, black and sleek, which Aloysius bought him for one of his birthdays. When he pulled the scissors out, he would study them for a while, trying to imagine their owner. Some internet sleuths theorised that the killer was a ‘he’ and either a high school student or a college student, and they would post photographs of people they thought Syo could possibly be, some dead, some not.

All of them turned out to be wrong.

Byakuya found that out personally.

“Those ain’t mine!”

He flinched. The girl standing opposite him, a head shorter, pierced him with her bright eyes. She grinned as she waved the scissors bought all those years ago that turned out to be fake. Fraudulent. Counterfeit. Never having once belonged to Genocider Syo, or even a lesser known serial killer.

And this girl would know... after all, she was Genocider Syo.

Keeping to his word, and though it took him years, Byakuya learned the identity of the murderer dubbed Genocider Syo. However, the discovery had not turned out like he anticipated. He hadn’t expected to be locked up in a school with fourteen other students, and he hadn’t expected a visitor, a stuttering girl with owl-eye glasses, a shifty gaze and a hunched posture, to come into his room and tell him that she had an alter who was the person who had captured Byakuya’s attention for many, many, many hours.

Her coming to his room? Understandable. That girl followed him around everywhere. But to tell him that she shared a body with a serial killer? Even he felt like she wrenched a rug from beneath him.

The aforementioned alter stood in front of him and flicked her long tongue that always seemed to hang out of her mouth. She tossed the fake scissors that he presented to her over her shoulder. They landed on her bed. 

Syo had shown off her actual scissors earlier, during the last trial orchestrated by their captor, an anthropomorphic bear, and she did so again now, taking a set from the leather pouch affixed to her thigh. Her eyes gleamed as she brandished the scissors, her scissors, a thumb and a finger tucked through the metal rings. 

“I told you, but in case you don’t want to look up the exact quote, to summarise, all my scissors are handmade,” said Syo. She tipped her head to one side, leaving a beat of silence, and furrowed her brow. “Except the first set. I stole those from a store the same night I murdered that bit character in Shikoku, only for Gloomy to hide them. So I had to make my own from then on, right?”

Byakuya let her continue uninterrupted.

“I didn’t want to keep stealing them,” Syo explained, and she folded her arms over her chest, suddenly sombre. “I’d be like Bobby Leach, doing all that crazy shit and then slipping on an orange peel and dying. If I’m gonna hit the big house, it’ll be for murder, not for stealing, so I made my own, yeah? Like Akina Nakamori has her huskiness, I have my cute trademark too!”

A wide grin lit up her face and obnoxious laughter burst out of her. Byakuya’s eardrums twinged and he shot a glare at her. The first person she mentioned was a British stunt artist from the early twentieth century and the latter person, Byakuya didn’t know, but he assumed she was a celebrity. An idol or an actress. That kind of person.

He slowly pushed up his glasses, not breaking eye contact. After so long, he had Genocider Syo in front of him, and this opportunity to talk to her wouldn’t last. In this mutual killings scenario, there would only be one winner, and so she would perish along with the rest of their supposed classmates. Either she would be killed, or she would kill. 

With this in mind, he had come to her room. She wouldn’t be able to get away with murdering him if he was killed here, where she would be the first suspect.

Well, she could still kill him, but he liked a little danger sometimes.

Byakuya just wished she would stop getting sidetracked.

“They’re fake, but those scissors you got are initialled... That’s real corny!” Syo threw her head back and laughed again, clutching her sides. When she flushed that out of her system, she fixed her eyes on him, smirking. “I didn’t come up with the name. Saw it in the papers first and it struck a chord. Until then, I didn’t have a name and had to use Gloomy’s.”

“The police were under the assumption that you were male,” Byakuya told her, watching as Syo swayed restlessly.

He wished she would keep still too. Everything about her gave him a headache.

“That’s because the police are morons, but can you blame them?” she said. “My parents and even the doctor who held me up like I was a cartoon lion when I was shit out of someone’s vagina thought I was a boy.”

She stopped rocking from side to side and eyed him.

“But Gloomy’s a girl, wouldn’t you say?” she added.

“Undeniably,” said Byakuya without having to think.

Syo studied him some more.

“Seems like you’re a real big fan of me,” she said. She raised her scissors, opened them, then shut them again. Her grin broadened, full of teeth. “I can imagine you bent over your desk, pictures of my work all around you, one of your hands on the edge of your desk and your other hand underneath it, blanking your blank!”

Byakuya felt a jolt. His chest clenched. This woman had no filter at all. He glowered and spoke through his teeth. “Whatever you’re insinuating is incorrect.”

“Never said it happened! Just that I can imagine it,” she chirped as she wiggled her chin at him. She smacked her hands onto her cheeks. “Gloomy’s not the only one with a boundless imagination! How about instead of this stuffy interview, we get to the chase! You want to know about my crimes? How about we reenact it? You would look so cute on my wall! I don’t normally do this, but I could even give you a BJ! It’s the stuff of fanfictions!”

His face grew hotter. “We will not do that at all,” he said, his voice cracking as he raised it despite his efforts to not show any heightened emotion around her.

Only she could get under his skin like that. Not even the mastermind managed it like Syo did. And oh how he hated it. The difference between Touko and Syo was stark. While Touko mumbled and fidgetted and had a passion for novels, romance and classics in particular, Syo squawked and danced about and seemed like the sort of person who spurned novels and drooled over trashy yaoi.

“Saving yourself for marriage?” she said, simpering, and she flumped back onto the bed. “Or did no one ever teach you how to get dirty? I guess because your dad’s seed got planted up your lady in a lab, he never learned. Bet he was a virgin.”

Byakuya hesitated. It was true that his mother had been artificially inseminated with his father’s sperm in a private Togami-owned clinic. This was something that he didn’t go around telling anyone, even her, as if that would have deterred her from her advances. 

But she also used past tense, like he stopped being a virgin, or he died.

He pinched his lips together. Whatever. Most could have come to the same conclusion as her.

“You’re so hot even when you’re pulling faces!” she crowed in delight, and she drummed her heels against her bed. “Argh, do me do me do me, Byakuya-sama!”

Syo hugged herself, shuddering. He refused to dignify any of that. She settled down a bit. Her eyes flitted to him.

“You got any other questions for me, Byakuya-sama?” she asked.

“Why did you start killing people?” he said, peering over at her and not approaching the bed. “Your victims are all men. You said they were attractive, but is that really it?”

“Eh? Why does an artist paint? Why does a singer perform?” she retorted, like talking about the weather or something equally mundane. “Why does a sister dedicate herself to her twin sister even if she’ll get stabbed in the back or skewered by spears in the end? It’s a feeling. Passion.”

Byakuya tried to speak, to request her to elaborate, but Syo sat up and talked over him.

“Hey, hey. You’re an interviewer. A sexy interviewer, but an interviewer all the same, not a freaking psychiatrist,” she said firmly. “It’s who I am, okay? Some people are born with red hair, and some are like me, killers.”

Syo motioned toward herself. He stared at her.

“There is no one like you,” he told her plainly.

She didn’t react at first. Then she snorted and flailed happily.

“Aw, you’re making me blush! You’re overthinking it, Darling.” Syo steadied herself, and while she still grinned, there was an edge to it. “Listen, if I wanted to tell my life story, I’d go to that sister of yours, Shinaboo-boo the bear.”

He inhaled through his nose but otherwise betrayed nothing. To name his half-sister like that... a half-sister that he didn’t make public knowledge... how could she...?

“Though, she’d probably change some facts, right?” remarked Syo thoughtfully, tapping herself on the chin. “It’s not beneath her. Whatever it takes to uphold the family name. Skip over all the killing, and maybe not mention you being Polaris. Some people would get real mad, trust me.”

Byakuya widened his eyes and let slip a small gasp.

“How do you know that?” he asked. He never told anyone about that. He never would. Especially not someone he had only read about, otherwise a near stranger. A serial killer.

She laughed.

“Tell me!” he demanded, louder.

Syo laughed more, shaking, then tipped her head forward with that same, same grin.

“You think I’m in a glass case on display,” she said. It could have been a question, but he doubted she meant it to be one. “Maybe I am. And you can see in, but I can see out, y’know?”

“What?” he said heatedly, raising his fists. “I don’t have time for your inane metaphors. How do you know this about me?”

“You don’t remember?” she asked, and he really did not. She resumed her laughter and realising he wouldn’t get anything more out of her, he left her room, feeling like he knew less than he did before.

* * *

 

How she knew about what she said to him became clear within the next few weeks. Painfully clear. The whole Togami Conglomerate... had been wiped out. Murdered. Byakuya didn’t feel emotional loss from that. Never had. For people with families, he supposed, they might feel saddened, and while the conglomerate had his surname and people he shared DNA with, like his father, he didn’t consider any of them family. Just business associates. People would call him heartless for only being concerned that a group he considered strong, the strongest, had been annihilated, and not because his father begged for his life on live television before being shot by an imposter dressed as his biological son. 

Byakuya’s fiancée put it best when the conversation once came up during lunch and Aoi Asahina asked him about his lack of emotion. He wasn’t the one who was heartless - everyone around him while he grew up had been. 

At that point, Byakuya and his now soon-to-be wife hadn’t been dating. Back then, Byakuya wouldn’t have believed that he would plan to marry someone not chosen for him by someone else, like his mother had been chosen to marry his father because of Byakuya’s accomplishments. Had someone told him years ago that he would have chosen his own wife because he cared for her in a way that he, at the time, mocked and scoffed and considered to be a weakness beneath him, he would have blanked out their existence for the rest of his life as they clearly had nothing of worth to say.

How things changed.

He adjusted his tie, staring at his full length mirror, and heard the door open.

“There you are! I knew if I followed the scent of sex, I’d find you!” came a voice behind him.

His reflection grimaced.

And how some things didn’t change. He held in a sigh and looked over his shoulder. Just as expected, there was Syo, dressed in a satin purple nightdress. She sat down heavily on their bed, one leg crossed over the other, vibrating with energy.

Byakuya regarded her coolly.

“Is the stove on?” he asked.

“Dunno!” she said with a shrug. “Didn’t check. I think Gloomy was adding pepper to breakfast and got a whiff of it, or something. So here I am! Da, da, da!”

She threw out her arms, beaming. 

It had probably been switched off then. Syo focused on him.

“What’s with the suit? It’s even sexier than usual,” she said playfully as she stretched out her legs.

He frowned and turned around completely to face her. 

“Did you think to check the calendar? It’s the day of the wedding,” he said.

The amused glow on Syo’s face dimmed. Surely, she must have known. In the past, Syo and Touko hadn’t shared memories, but with support and therapy, they had learned to do something called co-fronting, or they could be aware of what was going on while the other fronted at the least.

“That thing,” she stated in monotone, and Byakuya had a suspicion that she had known the whole time. She forced herself to perk up, but it was like she had two lights in her and only one was turned on. “Why don’t we bail on that stuffy show and have some fun? Just you and me... and maybe Hiro-kun. God, you need to get hotter friends.”

His expression didn’t soften.

“I’m not skipping the wedding,” said Byakuya. “You know that.”

Syo groaned and flung her head back. 

“Bor-ring!” she said loudly. “Weddings are boring!”

“I’m aware of your feelings, but you’re not getting married,” he said. “I’m marrying Touko.”

She kept her head angled back and pouted.

“You’re going to want me to switch out, aren’t you?” she asked, and he didn’t answer. Her head snapped forward and she beckoned to him with her hand, her lips twisted tightly. It could have been a smile, but Byakuya doubted it. “Well, if you give me a good fuck, I might consider it!”

He narrowed his eyes. “Syo.”

Her face sobered. She clicked her tongue and hunched her shoulders, turning her head away. 

“I can see you’re not gonna be swayed,” she grumbled, and she slouched even more. “Ugh, you’re lucky that Gloomy loves you so much, because I’d have killed you by now otherwise.”

Byakuya inclined his head to one side. Syo’s eyes were averted away from him.

“You have claimed that you and her share feelings,” he noted. “But... I wonder, if that’s really it?”

She tensed, still not looking. “Eh?”

He cupped his chin.

“I’m wondering if you have come to care about Touko,” he said. Syo twitched and shot him a cold look.

“Care? Listen, I’ve never hated Gloomy, even though she barely tolerates me. Most of the time, she hated my guts...” She slapped a hand against her cheek, pretending to swoon, but she spoke harshly. “Oh, Genocider has killed my crush, oh woe, woe... Can I really be blamed though? I’m a ruthless stone cold killer! It’s like telling a baby not to cry!”

“You’ll probably find that a lot of people blame you,” he deadpanned.

Her brow quirked.

“You’re arguing back?” she said. His face didn’t quiver.

“I’m just saying,” he told her, and she lowered her gaze.

The room fell silent. Syo twiddled her thumbs, kicking her legs gently over the side of the bed. Seeing her like this, contemplative and reserved, reminded him more of Touko than of Syo, though Touko’s confidence had improved a lot since they first met. She hadn’t styled her hair this morning and it was unruly around her, not yet tamed into one or two braids, but her signature glasses sat on her nose.

Usually, Syo wasn’t hard to read, blurting any and all thoughts as they entered her head, but right now, Byakuya could only guess what thoughts passed through her mind as she stared intently into space.

“Tell me,” said Byakuya, watching her closely, “did you hate yourself?”

Syo blinked. Wavered. Looked at him. “What?”

“If you share emotions, such as your love for me, then when she hated you, did that mean you hated yourself?” asked Byakuya.

She looked away again. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not?”

“It just doesn’t!” Syo snarled, stomping a foot. Byakuya’s features gave a calm tremble like someone blew gently on his face. “I love being me! Why wouldn’t I?”

Her eyes blazed with an inner fire.

“Anyway, I thought I was the cute ditz!” Syo hissed, thrusting out her chin. “You’re getting sidetracked. I said I was going to let you get married. That’s what’s convenient, right? I’m sticking around for plot points, and then - ”

She trailed off. Some of her fervour ebbed away, and she balled her hands into fists.

Byakuya frowned.

“You know, you don’t have to be ashamed of caring for someone,” said Byakuya quietly.

Syo went slack, then cringed. Obviously, she heard what he said, but she abstained from answering him. That didn’t stop him from talking though.

“I was of a similar mind to you,” he told her. “I thought caring for someone was a weakness to be exploited...”

Byakuya walked over to her. He tucked his fingers under her chin and pushed up. Syo’s brow puckered as their eyes met.

“... but thanks to your alter, I know it doesn’t have to be that way,” he finished. “And I can’t say that you don’t get some strength from your feelings either. I heard that it gave you strength to back down from your chase of Monaka Towa, not just your love for me but your friendship with Naegi’s sister too.”

The tension in her face didn’t subside. Byakuya lowered his hand and stepped back. She touched her chin, feeling where he had held her. A faint blush dusted her cheeks.

“Tch,” clucked Syo, and she dropped her hand from her face. Very pointedly, she trained her eyes on her lap. “You’ve lost your edge, Darling.”

“Judging by your sudden meekness, I think I’ve still got it,” he said, feeling a smirk rise to his face.

“I should kill you,” she said in a light tone, still not making eye contact.

His eyes widened a bit.

“Do it,” he said, just as hushed.

With lightning reflexes, she whipped out a pair of scissors from the holster she still wore on her thigh. Before he could apprehend what was happening, she had him pinned to a wall and she held the blades of her scissors to his neck. 

Byakuya breathed slowly, staring, and she stared back. With a tiny bit more pressure, she could nick him. Get him to bleed a little. Squirm.

Time crawled by. The scissors declined and eventually fell to her side without making a single mark on him. Syo aimed her gaze at his chest. Not at his eyes.

“Do you want to see the dress?” he asked casually, like she hadn’t tried to kill him. Because she hadn’t. They both knew that.

Syo gave a stiff nod and shrugged. He stepped past her and crossed over to the wardrobe, feeling her eyes burn into the back of his neck as opened it and revealed the dress. The white textured bodice had a sweetheart neckline with ruffled off-shoulder sleeves and a lace cape decorated with silhouettes of butterflies, and the same fabric as the cape was used for the outer layers of the skirts, reaching far enough to end at the feet.

“Western, eh...?” said Syo, craning her neck a little. “Just like in movies. I knew it. Gloomy’s so predictable.”

“Do you want to try it on?” he asked.

She recoiled. Hard. Jerked her head back.

“W-What?” she barked, and she couldn’t even pretend to laugh. Her shoulders shook like she was laughing though. “Aren’t you worried I’ll get blood on it? Though, it could do with a bit of colour, don’t you think?”

Syo ended her question with a grin. He didn’t reply, waiting for her to answer his offer properly, and she noticed. Her smile slid off.

“I told you, marriage ain’t my thing!” she huffed. “It’s Gloomy’s!”

Byakuya didn’t respond still. She rolled her eyes and exhaled loudly. 

“Alright, I’ll humour you,” she groused. “Geez.”

Neither laughed though. He helped her into the dress and once it was on her, he stepped back and let her examine herself in the mirror. Syo didn’t speak, barely moving save for pushing back a bit of hair, adjusting her glasses, wringing her hands. Little restless fidgets like that. They shared the same body, but for the first time, Syo’s mannerisms were like that of Touko. For the first time, Syo looked like Touko.

“It’s girly...” Syo muttered.

“That’s your gender, isn’t it?” he said, unable to take his eyes off her.

“Hell if I know.”

Syo scrutinised her reflection for a while longer, strangely quiet, until finally she turned to Byakuya and hiked up her skirts. He knew what she was searching for, and indeed, she found the leather pouch of scissors like he expected, but then she fiddled and removed the pouch completely. 

Then, stranger still, she held it out to him, as if she wanted him to -

“ - take them,” she said.

Byakuya peered at the pouch, at a loss for words.

“Listen,” said Syo, strengthening her grip. The pouch creaked in her hand. “A long time ago, I made a promise to Naegi. I said that I wouldn’t kill again if I could be with you. You’ve always been different, Darling. Gloomy has had her fair share of crushes on boys and girls, but you... her feelings go deep.” 

Therefore, Syo’s ran deep. 

“Like the chocolate coating at the bottom of a glass that held ice cream milkshake,” she added, whatever that meant, but Byakuya thought he understood. 

She jiggled the pouch, as if reminding him to take them from her, but he didn’t budge.

“I mean, who can blame her?” said Syo, trying not to smile but failing. A thin one oozed out. “You’re fit. Hot. You’re really smart, but other times, you’re really dumb but it’s always in a cute way. You’re fun to tease, especially when you scowl, and...”

He grabbed her shoulder suddenly. Syo tensed, and before she had chance to process what was happening, he leaned in.

Her breathing suspended as he pecked her lips. Their glasses clacked together.

“If you just shared feelings with Touko, you wouldn’t have been able to say that,” he said as he straightened, feeling his face burn. 

Unlike when she said lewd things, however, it wasn’t so bad this time. Syo had her own unique charm that excited him like no other, unpredictable and captivating even now. His heart skipped as he gazed at her.

“Also... thank you for taking care of Touko, all this time,” he said, hollowing his cheeks as he tried not to smile. He failed, much like she had.

She blinked, then laughed that grating laugh of hers and rubbed her knuckles against her eyes.

“Wow, you worried about stinking or something?” she said. “You’ve put on enough deodorant for both of us. It’s making my eyes sting.”

A snort escaped her.

“Yep, I definitely hate weddings. Too mushy. I think I’ll let Gloomy take over,” she said, almost babbling. “You shouldn’t see the bride in her dress before the wedding, you know. I better go take it off.”

Before he could reply, Syo hurried into the bathroom and shut the door behind herself. Byakuya stayed where he was.

There was a sneeze from inside.

“W-What’s going on?” asked Touko, rustling. “Why am I crying?”

Apparently, Syo had chosen to front by herself.

“You’re getting changed. Our friends should be here soon to do your makeup and hair,” he said calmly, used to having to fill in blanks for them. 

“Oh, okay,” she said, faltering a bit, still confused. “Thank you, Darling.”

He smiled, adjusted his glasses and left the bedroom. Once through the door, he gave his eyes a quick wipe and headed for the stairs.

They had a wedding to prepare for, after all.


End file.
